New W3C website deployed

The redesigned W3C website is now live! 

There is more to do, but this deployment concludes the four months the site was available in Beta, which followed a year of internal preparation, and two years of work with UK-based digital agency Studio 24, to whom we awarded the website redesign project in early 2020. For me personally, this is a milestone of the “action item” I took over 4 years ago to communicate more effectively what our organization does with a more modern, inclusive, usable website. 

Redesigning a website and content that has been building up since 1994 is a massive undertaking, so we chose to break it down into phases and focus first on a subset of the public-facing pages most useful to key audiences: 

• W3C homepage 
• /Standards, /Participate, /Membership, /Consortium 
• W3C Blog & Blog article 
• Business ecosystem landing pages 
• Work Groups 'profile' pages (new) 
• /TR homepage 
• Account pages 
• Others as determined by Information Architecture 

This as well as goals and other related elements are documented in a slide deck I created at the start of the project. 

On the surface, the new site implements current web best practices and technologies, donned a cleaner and elegant visual design, and provides information (in many cases rewritten and consolidated) in a more user-friendly fashion. 

Under the hood, everything changed. From the complete information architecture to the CMS and the tools that make all of our sub-sites work together. 

Feedback on the site itself and the content is expected as issues on our GitHub repository. 

We will gradually work to address existing non-blocking issues (in association with Studio 24 who now help us with support and maintenance), and to include the rest of the site as part of this design, starting with deploying the Chinese and Japanese localized sites for which we have seeded a lot of the work already. 

Finally, I want to acknowledge the considerable help I got along this captivating project from the entire W3C Systems Team, in particular this project could not have happened without the contributions from Vivien Lacourba, Jean-Guilhem Rouel, Gerald Oskoboiny, Laurent Carcone, Denis Ah-Kang. Thank you. 

More information on the W3C Website redesign: 

The goals of the redesign were to achieve a cleaner and modern look and greater usability, better accessibility, as well as ultimately simplifying how the site is managed. We also want to offer integrated Japanese and Chinese versions. 

Studio 24 documented the collaboration and process on the redesign of our website in a “work in the open” site, notably today's update. You can read more about today’s milestone from Studio 24’s blog post.